


total eclipse of the bark

by Deisderium



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, And Who Can Blame Him, Beefy Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Gets a Hug, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, But it doesn't happen, Corgis, Dogs, First Kiss, First Meetings, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, M/M, Meet-Awkward, Meet-Cute, Steve Rogers Is Thirsty, Threat of Animal Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 23:29:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17395775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deisderium/pseuds/Deisderium
Summary: Steve's first day at the flower shop, he walks into the break room to find an extremely large and muscular man having a breakdown because his dog is sick. Only an asshole wouldn't try to comfort that large and muscular man.





	total eclipse of the bark

Steve Rogers had only been working at Odinsson's Flower Mart for half a day, just long enough to take the tour and make a few designs--nothing exciting yet, just a couple of dozen rose arrangements and small packed mounds. Mr. Odinsson ("Call me Thor," he'd boomed, staggering Steve with a clap on the back, but Steve was waiting to see what his new coworkers called him) had told him to familiarize himself with the most popular orders before he let him loose on the expensive orders. Steve had high hopes for this place; they did most of the higher-end flower business in town, and he'd been angling for a spot on their design team for some time now.

Steve had gotten his workstation tentatively set up to his liking, but there was a brief lull in orders, and he decided a coffee was in order. The break room was down a hallway and boasted a high end industrial single-serve coffee maker that Steve was really looking forward to trying out. He pushed open the door and made a beeline for the coffee, the only thought in his mind how frothy exactly he could make his latte. He hadn't even picked out a coffee pod when he heard a quiet noise behind him.

He whirled, embarrassed at having overlooked a whole-ass human being in the room with him, but whatever he was about to say died unspoken. 

It was indeed a whole-ass human being. Whole ass and whole...everything. Steve wasn't tall; this guy very much was. Steve was all lean muscle and rangy bone, built from his morning runs; this guy looked like he bench-pressed elephants before breakfast. He was facing away from Steve, leaning against the wall with his hands over his head in a position of such abject despondency that Steve almost felt bad for admiring what it did to his muscular back and the heather-gray ODINSSON'S t-shirt making a valiant effort to bridge the space between his shoulder blades. 

Then the guy made that tiny sound again, and Steve's heart dropped. It was the soundtrack to match his posture: a tiny sob, the attempt to muffle the sound. 

"Are you okay?" Steve asked. 

The guy turned around, and Steve's pulse, never altogether regular, jumped a little. The answer was very obviously no. His face was blotchy and tear-streaked, and strands of dark hair were coming out of his low ponytail. "I can't stop crying," he said apologetically. "My dog--" His voice cracked and he had to stop and take a breath while tears streamed unimpeded down his face. "The vet called. She's been having some digestive issues, and they found--they found tumors--and I'm gonna have to put her to sleep." He sucked in a breath, trying to calm himself, but it wasn't working. "She's only three," he whispered, and then those broad shoulders heaved again in a fresh round of sobbing. 

"Hey," Steve said, crossing the room and putting a hand on the guy's back. "That sucks. It's okay to be sad about it." 

And the guy just--collapsed, like someone had cut his strings. He sagged into Steve, like he had no question that Steve could support his weight, like he just needed somebody to hold him so bad it didn't matter that it was a stranger.  "Hey," Steve said again, and maneuvered them to the table, guiding the crying man into a chair and taking the one next to him without letting go. 

The guy scrubbed at his face. It made very little difference to the tear tracks down his beautiful cheekbones. His red-rimmed blue eyes focused on Steve. "I'm Bucky," he said. "You must be Steve. I'm s-sorry about this." 

"Don't apologize." Steve rubbed circles into the small of Bucky's back, helpless to think of anything else to do in the face of his obvious suffering. It felt like he was patting concrete slabs, but maybe it would help. "I'd be an asshole if I minded you being upset about your dog." He wished he were better at people.

"Her name is Rina." Bucky sniffed again. "It means--it means joy." And with that, he crumpled against Steve's shoulder, another shaky breath ripping out of him, a fresh wave of tears rolling down his face. 

Steve's higher brain function temporarily shorted out. That was the only explanation he could find. His hand moved of its own accord to the freakishly-handsome-but-ravaged-by-sorrow face of the tectonic plate of a man weeping against his shoulder and gently cupped his cheek, pulling him against Steve's much-narrower chest. 

"Shhh," his mouth said without any input from his useless brain, _thanks brain_ , "I've got you." His other hand continued patting Bucky's back. Steve could smell his laundry detergent and his shampoo. It made him want to lean in closer and take a deep breath, and what was wrong with him? 

And instead of pushing him away or laughing at him or whatever a normal person would do in that situation, Bucky leaned into him and sobbed his heartbreak into Steve's t-shirt, his hand coming level with Steve's pecs, fist clenching around a handful of Steve's shirt.

 _Oh no_ , Steve thought, with whatever small mental function he retained. Bucky's arms were as large as the rest of him, and bent like this, his bicep formed a perfect curve, huge and smooth and _right there_ , and there was a vein snaking along the expanse of tan skin and the first thought that popped into his head was _lick him arms_ and that didn't even make _sense_ , and oh god, it would be so inappropriate to get a boner while holding a very muscular grieving man he had just met. _Don't get hard, don't get hard_ , he beseeched his dick, but it was just as much of a traitor as his brain. 

The door opened, and a young woman holding a coffee cup started to come in. She caught sight of Steve and Bucky and her mouth formed a silent O of surprise. Par for the course, Steve panicked and glared at her, because if they moved he would have to stand up and _he could not stand up right now_. She nodded and quietly backed out the way she'd come in. He thought her name was Wanda. He'd have to bring her a very fancy apology coffee. 

His hand was now wet and kind of gross from holding Bucky's face like a weirdo. Should he move it? Was it helping? Would it be more awkward to move it or leave it? It had been awkward to grab his face in the first place, _Steven_. His shirt was also wet and kind of gross with Bucky's tears, and he was altogether too focused on the warmth of Bucky's hand approximately 1.5 inches from Steve's nipple. His nipple had noticed, and if Bucky weren't currently swimming in a river of tears, he'd have probably been aware, since Steve's nipples were poking extremely perky bumps in his shirt, right next to his face. God, now Steve had thought the word _nipple_ so many times that it sounded like a fake word. He needed to get a hold of himself. 

"What kind of dog is she?" he asked, trying to get his attention on anything but his physical reaction to Bucky. A big guy like this probably had a big dog, right? Maybe a lab or a shepherd mix. A Great Dane or an Irish Wolfhound, maybe.

"Oh," Bucky said, and straightened up. Steve's hand fell away from his face as he did. He wiped it on the back of his shirt as discreetly as he could. Bucky swiped the back of his hand over his eyes and looked at Steve almost shyly from behind the hair that had come loose from his ponytail. "Do you want to see a picture?" 

"I'd love to," Steve said. Bucky let go of his shirt, to Steve's relief and regret, and dug in his back pocket for his phone. He got it unlocked and Steve had a moment to appreciate that the wallpaper was Bucky holding a loaf  of bread with large ears, and then Bucky tapped his photo app and opened up a folder labeled "Rina." Steve's heart lurched for reasons he didn't want to examine too closely as Bucky tapped the first picture. 

He was holding a tiny orange-brown corgi puppy in the crook of his massive arm, the dog barely as long as his forearm. In the photo, he was smiling a broad and uncomplicated grin. At that moment, Steve knew he was completely fucked. Bucky was beautiful when he was sad and crying, but when he smiled, he was the best thing Steve had ever seen. He couldn't function around the sad version; how was he going to get work done and keep from, say, accidentally cutting his own fingers off if Bucky smiled in his direction? And Steve wanted him to be happy. He wanted to see that smile in person, the flash of his teeth, the crinkled skin at the corners of his eyes. The dog looked like she was smiling, too.

"She's beautiful," Steve croaked. 

"Thanks." Bucky sniffed and flipped to the next photo, in which he was holding a much-bigger Rina. She still looked tiny in his giant arms. It had been taken in winter because she was wearing a knitted sweater that matched Bucky's scarf and oh god, Steve didn't know what to do with the feelings he was feeling. 

Bucky's phone rang, and he almost dropped it. Steve automatically tried to catch it too, and for a second, their hands tangled together. Steve saw a vet's name flash across the screen, and then Bucky fumbled it to his ear, mouthing "sorry." Steve watched as he uh-huh'ed his way through a conversation, and then, like the sun breaking over the horizon, his expression changed. 

"They--they did?" he said. "She is? Thank you. Thank you!" 

He dropped the phone on the table and lunged at Steve. Steve was suddenly crushed to an enormous chest by two arms composed of more beef than Steve possessed in his entire body. He just had time to think _if I die, I die happy_ , when Bucky kissed him full on the mouth. It was a chaste kiss, just the press of lips to his, an expression of joy, and then Bucky pulled back, smiling with his entire face. 

"They mixed up the x-rays! It was a new tech's first day and they just brought the wrong ones to the vet. She doesn't have cancer. She ate styrofoam, that stupid dog." He enveloped Steve in another hug. "Thank you," he said against Steve's hair, "for being so nice to me." 

"Any time," Steve managed to say before Bucky excused himself to get his dog back from the vet. Steve could hear him calling for Thor in the hallway. 

Steve ran a shaking hand through his hair and tried to process what the fuck had just happened. He lost a second to thoughts of the most beautiful mountain range of a man he'd ever seen kissing him after crying on him, then pulled himself together. Bucky was a coworker, for fuck's sake, and he'd obviously had a very emotional morning, and...and Steve was not going to make it weird.

Steve went to the coffee machine and made two salted caramel lattes, one for him and one for Wanda. He made sure to get the foam on hers the maximum amount of frothy possible. 

*

His first day had gone pretty well, Steve thought. After he'd delivered his apology latte, he'd chatted with Wanda for a while and he thought he was on his way to having at least one friend at work. Thor (yep, none of his employees called him Mr. Odinsson) had watched him make a series of successively larger arrangements and as his last order assigned an expensive contemporary arrangement, Steve's favorite kind to make. He'd managed to mostly banish the memory of his awkward boner and tried to focus instead on Bucky thanking him. He would get his shit together before work tomorrow, he promised himself. He wouldn't make it weird the next time he saw him.

This resolution lasted exactly as long as it took him to get to his car, where Bucky was leaning against Steve's beat-up VW Bug, his hair down, cradling Rina to his chest. The dog barked when she saw Steve, ears perked forward, muzzle open in a canine grin. 

"Hi, Steve," Bucky said.

"Hey there, Bucky," Steve said. He was even more gorgeous outside, the late-afternoon light edging him in gold. Steve's gaze dropped to his mouth for just a second, the sense memory of his lips a brand against his own. Bucky set Rina on the ground, and she came over to sniff Steve's legs. 

Steve bent down to pet her and she wagged her stubby tail so hard that her entire body wiggled. He ran his fingers through her thick fur. "I'm glad you're okay," he told her, then stood back up again.

"What are you doing tonight?" Bucky said. 

Steve stuck his hands in his pockets and told himself to be cool. "Nothing. Why?" 

"I was hoping I could take you out to dinner," Bucky said. "To thank you for this morning." He chewed on his lip for a second. "And, um, as a date." 

"Really?" Steve said, like a dumbass. Then, as his brain caught up, "I mean, yes."

Bucky ran his hands through his hair and even in the evening light, Steve thought he was blushing. "I promise I'm not always such a mess." Steve had a moment of vertigo where he replayed the morning but from Bucky's perspective and realized that both of them were probably embarrassed and trying not to be weird in front of the other. Strangely enough, that made him feel better.

"I believe you." Steve smiled at him. "And I'd like to get to know you." 

Bucky tilted his head and looked at Steve through his hair. "I shouldn't have kissed you without asking earlier." Just like that, Steve's heart was pounding a staccato rhythm against his ribs. 

"It's okay," he said. "I didn't mind." That was only not a lie if _didn't mind_ also covered _was extremely goddamn excited about it_.

"Oh, good," Bucky said. "Can I do it again?" 

Steve managed to get out a yes, and then Bucky's hands were tangled in his shirt, pulling him closer, and his mouth was on Steve's, and this time there was no reason for Steve to keep his hands to the small of Bucky's back, so he ran them over his sides and those biceps, mapping the topography of all that muscle by touch. Bucky licked into his mouth, and Steve lit up inside, and didn't stop even when something pulled against his legs, making him stagger.

Steve steadied himself against Bucky, and they both looked down at Rina, who had wrapped her leash around Steve's legs. Bucky untangled the leash and took Steve's free hand. "So about dinner. I know a dog friendly restaurant we could go to." 

"Then let's go to that one," Steve said. 

*

Steve woke up to the unfamiliar sensation of a cold nose pushing against his fingers. He groaned and rolled the other way, running into miles of smooth skin next to him. Bucky tightened his arms around Steve and pulled him onto his chest. "I'll get up and let her out in a minute," he told Steve, his voice rough with sleep, "and then I'll come right back to bed. I hope you don't mind." 

Steve burrowed deeper into the crook of his arm. "Not at all. It turns out I'm a dog person." 

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you read a [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/steebadore/status/1083813401166413825), and then you have to write a fic about it. This is my first modern no-powers AU--I hope you enjoy!


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